It was also a great deal to pay for merely not being watched. So that there was something to be found out, something that seemed innocent on the surface but wouldn’t bear continued looking at . . .
Annabelle was waiting. Maria said, carefully pleasant, “Thank you again, Miss Blair, but no.”
The pale eyes flashed over her from head to foot—was that contempt, or controlled rage? Annabelle said in a mildly wondering voice, “You really haven’t a price, have you?” The bold casual word dropped between them like a stone. She leaned backward in the rocker suddenly, thrusting her hands into the pockets of her coat. “Then why do you persist in staying here, Miss Rowan?”
Hands in her pockets—what had she gone back into her house to get, just before crossing the road? A handkerchief, of course, or a glove. Forget the water boiling briskly for tea yesterday, the tea that Annabelle, smiling, had said might taste a little strange . . . Maria occupied her own tense fingers with her unlit cigarette and managed a few’ reasonably offhand phrases. She had taken a leave of absence from her job, she got out of New York so seldom that she wasn’t anxious to rush back . . .
Annabelle watched her with the pale blank gaze that was more disturbing than any open thought. In the middle of it she said almost idly, as though Maria weren’t speaking at all, “You know, Miss Rowan, I’d rather you hadn’t forced me to tell you about your cousin. As you’re determined to find it out in any case, you might as well hear it now, from me.”
I won’t believe it, Maria thought stonily, but it seemed to her that a tiny shock had travelled around the room, dimming the colors, deepening the folds and patches of shadow, wiping out in a twinkling any familiarity or comfort or illusion of safety it might have held.
She lifted a match to her cigarette, and with the same conscious effort raised her eyebrows and gazed steadily at the woman across the room.
“I don’t know whether Mr. Simeon told you,” said Annabelle Blair in the same contemplative tone, “that Mr. Mallow was taken very ill just before we came East.”
“Oh, indeed he did,” Maria said, equally polite. “The point seemed to be that Gerald’s attack of ptomaine poisoning was really attempted murder by Louise. Someone tried to murder me with potato salad last summer too, but that didn’t come off either.”
“It isn’t funny, Miss Rowan,” said Annabelle Blair slowly, “when you realize that it wasn’t the first time your cousin had tried to kill her husband.”
She hadn’t—surely she hadn’t?—looked, for an instant, pitying.
Maria left her chair and walked into the kitchenette and took a glass down from the cupboard. She said over the rush of cold water, without turning around, “Really? And what were these other—attempts?”
Lies, she thought, drinking the water she didn’t want. The gesture gave her something to do with her hands, it broke the dangerous passivity, the helplessness of merely sitting there and listening. Illogically, she thought of the phonograph record placed under the sleeper’s pillow. Relaxed, unmoving, you admitted into your mind things that your full consciousness would reject; you woke up with a brain furnished with thoughts that seemed your own.
She wished, tightening the faucet, that she could turn off the flat unemotional voice behind her, the voice that was recreating an incident in the woods in November.
Gerald Mallow had rented a small lodge in Minnesota for three weeks during every fall hunting season, partly for his own enjoyment, partly because it made an impressive background for the frequent clients he invited. He had taught Louise how to use a rifle, developing her eye to the point where, on the weekend in question, they had made a bet on the first deer of the season and set out from the lodge in opposite directions.
An hour later Gerald, attired meticulously in brilliant red jacket and cap, had a rifle bullet graze his visor, an inch or two away from smashing through his brain.
“Hunters get shot at every season,” said Maria levelly.
“Of course, in open grounds. As it happened, Mrs. Mallow was carrying the only other rifle on a number of acres—and she admitted firing the shot. She said,” said Annabelle, her eyebrows up, “that she had gotten lost on leaving the lodge, and fired it as a signal.”
“Oh—you were there, then.”
“Yes, Mr. Mallow had a guest, a Mr. . . . Nesbitt, I think,” said Annabelle. “He was transferring some business, wheat shares, I believe—it was really a business weekend, so Mr. Mallow asked me to come along. Mr. Nesbitt had sprained a wrist his first day there, so we kept each other company in the lodge.”
But there might have been turning leaves, as brilliant as a hunting jacket—or there might have been a sound, deliberately startling, to make Louise Mallow’s finger pull the trigger prematurely. There might have been no shot at all, no narrow escape, no Mr. Nesbitt, except that Maria, reluctantly, bitterly, found them real.
“Accident?” Annabelle Blair was saying coolly. “Naturally Mr. Mallow let it go at that. Later that month, when he was bothered by insomnia, he very nearly took sleeping capsules that—with his heart—might easily have killed him. The capsules, which Mrs. Mallow had bought the week before, were in the medicine chest in place of the sedative his doctor had ordered.”
Maria’s throat felt dry. “Who stopped him?”
“He stopped himself, as I understand it. He generally took the capsules with water, but he had them with a hot drink that night. The first one melted on his tongue and the taste of it warned him.”
Maria got up again, automatically. She took her ashtray and emptied the
